Adrienne Rich — Letters to a Young Poet

1 Your photograph won’t do you justice those wetted anthill mounds won’t let you focus that lens on the wetlands five swans chanting overhead distract your thirst for closure and quick escape 2 Let me turn you around in your frozen nightgown and say one word to you: Ineluctable —meaning, you won’t get quit of this: the worst of the new news history running back and forth panic in the labyrinth —I will not touch you further: your choice to freeze or not to say, you and I are caught in a laboratory without a science 3 Would it gladden you to think poetry could purely take its place beneath lightning sheets or fogdrip live its own life screamed at, howled down by a torn bowel of dripping names —composers visit Terezin, film-makers Sarajevo Cabrini-Green or Edenwald Houses ineluctable if a woman as vivid as any artist can fling any day herself from the 14th floor would it relieve you to decide Poetry doesn’t make this happen? 4 From the edges of your own distraction turn the cloth-weave up, its undersea-fold venous with sorrow’s wash and suck, pull and release, annihilating rush to and fro, fabric of caves, the onset of your fear kicking away their lush and slippery fauna nurseried in liquid glass trying to stand fast in rootsuck, in distraction, trying to wade this undertow of utter repetition Look: with all my fear I’m here with you, trying what it means, to stand fast; what it means to move 5 Beneaped. Rowboat, pirogue, caught between the lowest and highest tides of spring. Beneaped. Befallen, becalmed, benighted, yes, begotten. —Be—infernal prefix of the actionless. —Be—as in Sit, Stand, Lie, Obey. The dog’s awful desire that takes his brain and lays it at the boot-heel. You can be like this forever—Be as without movement. 6 But this is how I come, anyway, pushing up from below my head wrapped in a chequered scarf a lanterned helmet on this head pushing up out of the ore this sheeted face this lanterned head facing the seep of death my lips having swum through silt clearly pronouncing Hello and farewell Who, anyway, wants to know this pale mouth, this stick of crimson lipsalve Who my dragqueen’s vocal chords my bitter beat my overshoulder backglance flung at the great strophes and antistrophes my chant my ululation my sacred parings nails, hair my dysentery my hilarious throat my penal colony’s birdstarved ledge my face downtown in films by Sappho and Artaud? Everyone. For a moment. 7 It’s not the déjà vu that kills it’s the foreseeing the head that speaks from the crater I wanted to go somewhere the brain had not yet gone I wanted not to be there so alone.